My mostly technical blog. An on-line journal of my activity in the IT industry and any other technical interests or techy things that happen to catch my attention.

Wednesday, 8 April 2009

Cloud computing - cloudforce and beyond...

Having recently attended Cloudforce UK - London (07th-04-2009) I though I'd blog a little with some resources and links.

I don't really want to re-invent the wheel and attempt to explain what cloud computing is exactly, hopefully some of the resources and links should cover that. For an overview, the Wikipedia entry is a good start http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

A couple of terms that crop up in this domain are:

SaaS - Software as a Service

PaaS - Platform as a Service

IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service

Cloudforce itself is a worldwide tour of salesforce.com - evangelising and spreading the word about their cloud products and frameworks, customer success stories and break out sessions covering aspects from development to opportunities.

Salesforce blerb about Apex "Force.com Apex Code is a strongly-typed programming language that executes on the Force.com platform. Apex is used to add business logic to applications, to write database triggers, and to program controllers in the user interface layer. It has a tight integration with the database and query language, good web services support, and includes features such as futures and governors for execution in a multi-tenant environment."

Cloudforce take-aways:

As well as the above, the overall event gave an impression of some key takeaway points.

The service cloud, service applications now integrating and utilising knowledge from social networking sources such as Twitter, Facebook etc as well as traditional sources such as Phone.

Easy of application creation

Speed of development

Enable business to meet customer demands in terms of cost or time to market that might otherwise be impossible